I speedily sat down to breakfast in an apartment on the left side of the little wustuddur, the fare was excellent; tea, fried fish, eggs, and grapes, not forgetting the celebrated bread of Joanna Correa.  I was waited upon by a tall Jewish youth of about twenty years, who informed me that his name was Haim Ben Atar, that he was a native of Fez, from whence his parents brought him at a very early age to Tangier, where he had passed the greater part of his life principally in the service of Joanna Correa, waiting upon those who, like myself, lodged in the house.  I had completed my meal, and was seated in the little court, when I heard in the apartment opposite to that in which I had breakfasted several sighs, which were succeeded by as many groans, and then came “Ave Maria, gratia plena, ora pro me,” and finally a croaking voice chanted:-

“Gentem auferte perfidam
Credentium de finibus,
Ut Christo laudes debitas
Persolvamus alacriter.”

“That is the old Genoese,” whispered Haim Ben Atar, “praying to his God, which he always does with particular devotion when he happens to have gone to bed the preceding evening rather in liquor.  He has in his room a picture of Maria Buckra, before which he generally burns a taper, and on her account he will never permit me to enter his apartment.  He once caught me looking at her, and I thought he would have killed me, and since then he always keeps his chamber locked, and carries the key in his pocket when he goes out.  He hates both Jew and Moor, and says that he is now living amongst them for his sins.”

“They do not place tapers before pictures,” said I, and strolled forth to see the wonders of the land.

CHAPTER LVI

The Mahasni—­Sin Samani—­The Bazaar—­Moorish Saints—­See the Ayana!—­The Prickly Fig—­Jewish Graves—­The Place of Carcases—­The Stable Boy—­Horses of the Moslem—­Dar Dwag.

I was standing in the market-place, a spectator of much the same scene as I have already described, when a Moor came up to me and attempted to utter a few words in Spanish.  He was a tall elderly man, with sharp but rather whimsical features, and might have been called good-looking, had he not been one-eyed, a very common deformity in this country.  His body was swathed in an immense haik.  Finding that I could understand Moorish, he instantly began talking with immense volubility, and I soon learned that he was a Mahasni.  He expatiated diffusely on the beauties of Tangier, of which he said he was a native, and at last exclaimed, “Come, my sultan, come, my lord, and I will show you many things which will gladden your eyes, and fill your heart with sunshine; it were a shame in me, who have the advantage of being a son of Tangier, to permit a stranger who comes from an island in the great sea, as you tell me you do, for the purpose of seeing this blessed land, to stand here in the soc with no one to guide him.  By